


Faded Circumstance

by Nightlock



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 04:28:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1731125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nightlock/pseuds/Nightlock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Warning: Season 2 finale spoilers</p>
<p>An alternate ending of the finale based off of a dream. Rated Mature for the violence. No beta.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Faded Circumstance

"Abigail..." It was a numbing feeling as though time stood still. Abigail, who Will considered his daughter, was alive. The call of her name left his lips of their own accord as though Will was on auto-pilot. It was like his mind could only process what he saw if accompanied by her name, and with possibility, she could disappear without the spell of her name spoken. Whatever vigor for justice he had storming in it was thwarted and buried with the sight of the crying girl before him. His gun aimed forward with full intent to use was gradually drawn downward and forgotten. 

"I didn't know what to do so I just did what he told me." She spoke with fresh tears and a broken voice. This image of his surrogate daughter was not of the unsure yet determined girl he remembered but the shell of her. The shell made of pure fear yet the instinct to survive. It was the fear and uncertainty that resembled a stray, lost girl who never found her way. She was hallowed but not of herself or of her own accord but fear drove her now as it did Will back then; as it still does now when his act isn't in play. It was maybe a moment where true connection could be formed if under different circumstances as they both shared the same strings attached to limbs along with the same puppeteer. 

"....Where is he?" Will asked with a combination of leftover awe of Abigail's revealing and slight deepness of his voice that could have been identified as buried anger. 

Abigail was silent but her wet eyes spoke louder than her voice ever could at that moment much like a child caught in the midst of telling a secret. A gradual turn of Will's body revealed Hannibal behind him. It was like seeing him the first time and there was silence. Their eyes spoke to one another where words could not. A gentle touch to the side of Will's face left him frozen in his own mind while Hannibal's tired eyes never left his.

"Do you forgive me?" Hannibal pulled in the younger man close to him in what was approximately too close like the initiation of a hug.

"What?" He turned his head towards Hannibal's ear to ask him anything to clear the confusion. There was no time for Will to process Hannibal's question or answer it properly when Will's face transformed from utter confusion to sudden, wretched pain. With only the leverage of the man before him he grabbed Hannibal's arm that supported Will for the entire process of the gutting of his lower stomach. The sounds of linoleum tearing through flesh was louder than the sounds of protesting pained sounds from Will; louder than the sound of his gun, long forgotten, falling to the floor or Abigail's dismay as she was a front row witness. Teeth gritted together as splays of blood dripped to the wood floor with a volume that was loud enough to be vulgar. 

"I forgive you, Will.” Hannibal offered before ending the close contact that allowed Will's body its own volition.

Will's legs give out from weakness and he collapses backwards to the nearby wall, then sliding down to the floor, while holding in his stomach to keep organs in place and to suppress the bleeding. A shocking gasp is heard near him as Abigail witnessed his gutting by the linoleum knife and the intention of Will's severing. Hannibal watches him writhing in excruciating pain but instead of a confession of emotions his person mask reversed off the floor and back to him like his tea cup couldn't. Pieces seamlessly fall back into place on his face, etched back into a man of controlled, cold curiosity. Once back together a sonata of classical song begins to play in his head before he speaks.

"During a time between life and death a person often dwells on their own life and their parents. An association of choices made leading up to that final moment of breath before death freely consumes. A hunger for life is like a thirst beyond our minds in this world yet we crave it like our bodies do nourishment, water and continual existence." The room is silent with the exception of gasping sounds of air from Will as though the blood draining from his own torso was drowning him as it poured from his body with little obstruction from the suppression his hands offered on the gash. Even Abigail fell silent with a new dress of tears among her cheeks as Hannibal's rich voice filled the room. In Hannibal's mind he has wafted back from this scene before him as a man who was exposed to a man concealed once again. Within his ears only the sweet sound of the aria plays peacefully with his thoughts of evaluation, observation and curiosity. He did not hear Will Graham clinging to life nor would it affect him if he did. The quiet place in the back of his mind, his stream, said as much as such ugliness was washed away. The Will Graham before him was art and of his design and he didn't feel sorrow of the results but relished the beauty of hues of Will and deep red melding together to form what was before him: a masterpiece to be. He still had zero intent to relieve himself of this art until it was finished. Even if that completion could lead to his undoing as it had done to this point.

"Do you feel pushed into a corner, Will?" Hannibal asks as he leans in, just slightly, as maroon eyes, gleaming a crimson red deeper than blood in light, glanced down at Will who's struggling with the shock from pain and injury. He was fighting unconsciousness from the attempted disembowelment. Will looks up with dark, storming eyes as his lips quiver with unspoken thoughts perched at the tip of his tongue. His eye contact, seemingly unbreakable, speaks volumes and Hannibal suppresses a smile.

"Do you," a pause of words for a thought, "feel motivated?" A slight quirk of the head with a lace of quiet, composed curiosity seeps through his accented voice. He vaguely asked as though what he was really asking to be clear. If no one else knew he knew Will would. Hannibal truly was back together playing psychiatrist again to invade Will's mind, as the knife did his flesh, and Will quietly stares while maintaining eye contact as though they were playing for power. It was like a maimed dog against a dragon but even with the struggle of maintaining focus from the pain he continued his losing battle. The silence feels eternal with Hannibal's question hanging thickly in the air with the smell of blood and tension.

"Y-yes." A sharp yet quiet reply with a stutter from the pain but his voice beyond it is as translucent as wet ice. A pull of lips dressed with Hannibal's own blood from the prior fight with Jack gleam in the room’s light.

"Good. Tell me, Will, how do you feel about that? You're at an edge that lacks an exit but does not guarantee safety. Much like a stray protecting its own life from those outside that lay obstacles before its needs of survival. Do you want to kill me now, Will?"

Will's eyes answer instantaneously with sharpness that could cause a flesh wound worse than his own he suffered from. That smile, traced back to their first encounter with Will's perspective behind bars, greeted those eyes. Hannibal crouched down to Will's level and held out the bloodied knife, traced with Will's own blood, in front him as an offering. Curiosity that was as dark as the creature Hannibal concealed behind human flesh was present but unyielding. It wouldn't be the first time Hannibal had offered his life as a fee to see Will reach his potential; his true self.

"Fate and circumstance has returned us to this moment when the tea cup shatters."

Before Hannibal could respond to Will's silent answer those deathly eyes that glared into his had softened. Wide open with confusion, fear and something in-between near unreadable.

"D-don't-," Will started with a trembling whisper as his eyes squinted for clarity, " _Please_ don't." Will took one of his bloodied hands that had been helping keep his injury in check to push Hannibal's hand away. Answering Hannibal's call to his offer had equal value to his life, maybe more. Will felt, in some kind of disturbing way as he lay against the wall bleeding to death, that he owed Hannibal this much. At this point it was all he could offer. That and the blood from his own hands that dirtied Hannibal's when he offered his answer.

Hannibal's smile was vanquished and replaced with distant grim line of indifference as Will struggled to speak. The younger man's face twisted in pain with a fresh stream of blood between quaking fingers at his gut and it resulted in another coughed gasp for air. To the trained ears there was a withheld of a dry sob. Hannibal stood in front of Will now looking down as the power to heal or kill loomed over his shoulders. To the psychological world both were equally as gratifying to one deemed a psychopath but were they really? Could they really stand as equal options? Not when Hannibal stared down at the weak, struggling form of Will Graham. It would be something he'd miss witnessing dearly if it was gone from the world. The world was better with him in it after all. Hannibal tilted his head in curiosity but mere automated reflex than intentional.

"Don't what, Will? I gave you a rare gift," another faint pause with a mental sound of a stitch or two snapping that halted the aria, "but you didn't want it."

"...D-d...didn't I?" There was another bout of silence of mere seconds that drew on like a river flows without clear distraction but just endlessly passing. Wet, glistening blue eyes and dark eyes that gleamed through maroon never left one another.

"Y-You...you were supposed to leave..." Words were laced with deeply embedded pain in a double sense of the word. Like a samurai sword without a dull side of the blade; no matter which way it went it hurt, cut and eventually could kill. Hannibal was silent as he stared at Will as his eyes began to dull of life; half-lidded and beginning to close further.

"Come to me, Abigail." Hannibal held out his hand that was stained with the blood of his past connections of lives he knew and spoke with a gentleness of a father, but his face was still bloodied and tired with eyes hiding a lethal beast inside. Her hesitant steps towards him and face stained with tears and fear was rewarded with a gentle take of her hand. He drew her close before whispering in her ear with words hidden from the room itself. More tears streamed down Abigail's face before she sprinted out of the room and to the front of the deathly silent home. Will began to groan words almost incoherently at the blurring sight of Abigail's form leaving his vision. The edges of his sight began to blacken and whether his remaining sight was blurred from pain, near unconsciousness, forming tears or all he didn't know. He just felt like his heart was heavy and his head was light. Probably from the blood loss but it was a familiar feeling of losing his grounding again without the burning pathology of encephalitis to blame. He could see a blurred form with mixtures of colors stained with pink and red move towards him; Hannibal. He shook his head weakly and suppressed the fall of tears that burned behind his eyes. In failure, he tried to move away, if nothing more than to preserve his life, but it was in vain as he was near motionless with rebellious limbs that refused to move and a limp neck that barely held up his head if not for it being propped up against the wall.

"Here. A-and it's ready..." A breathless voice holding back more tears. It was so far away, Abigail? Will couldn't see much but blurs and motions of color like watercolor to life.

Another voice, with a familiar richness rang in his ears but it sounded filtered and distant as though under water.

"We couldn't leave without you." Was his reply to Will's words prior as though their halted conversation's gears began to turn again where they left off.

"D-Dr.Lecter...can't.." He started but was hushed with the heaviness of his own lips. They were beginning to feel like lead, as his eye lids, and were beginning to halt. The last thing he saw and felt was a familiar, dark fabric of sorts over his form and the words:

"Let's go, Will." Suddenly Will's heavy body felt suspended in the air and encased in warmth that repelled the cold touch of death before unconsciousness finally took him.

**Author's Note:**

> I had a dream about the finale this morning and although it's not that different lines were either rearranged or omitted from the dream for whatever reason. I don't know, I just had to write this. It's not good or anything but it was fun to write. I think I watched the finale too many times and that's what lead to the dream. That and probably an inner desire to have an ending not so heart wrenching manifested when I was sleep lol
> 
> I hope any who read enjoy this even if a little. I'm sorry for silly mistakes and such. I didn't get this beta read and was typed on my phone. I proofread and edited this when I had access to my computer but there's no guarantee there aren't mistakes...


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